The Last Hurrah

Jan. 23, 2006 issue - When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, his campaign-trail theme was the exuberant Fleetwood Mac anthem "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." Fourteen years later, that "tomorrow" has arrived for the first baby-boomer president: he turns 60 in August. If he had a song these days, it might be Bob Dylan's wistful hymn "Forever Young." Heart surgery has left Clinton pallid and gaunt, and deepened the hint of melancholy that always lay beneath the surface of his preacherly style. He keeps busy, of course, with charitable work on tsunami and hurricane relief and AIDS in Africa, with global A-list parties and conferences, with kibitzing in back rooms on the nascent presidential candidacy of his wife, Hillary.

And yet, at a recent testimonial dinner for Rep. John Dingell of Michigan—a 79-year-old Democrat who has served for 50 years in Congress—Clinton sounded like he was searching for some new public mission, for some crusade that might be politically useful and personally rejuvenating. Dingell's doggedness was the model. "The secret to living a full life with no regrets and to staying young is to figure out what you believe in and fight for it," Clinton said somberly, biting his lower lip in a trademark display of hard-won understanding. "If you lose, don't give up. If you win, raise the bar, and then rare back and do something else. And remember that, with the accumulation of years, our responsibilities to the future grow greater, not less." The bipartisan audience applauded warmly as he loped off the stage.

As always—and for better or worse—Bill Clinton sums up the political persona and aspirations of his generation: the emotional brew of idealism and self-centeredness; the view of public life as a perpetual "fight" purified to abstraction by the boomers' relative lack of experience on real battlefields, in real wars. And now, as the former president indicated, the leading edge of the baby boom is trying to figure out the politics of the remainder of their lives. "We're facing a kind of final exam," says Nancy Bekavac, a Yale Law School classmate of Clinton's and, since 1990, the president of Scripps College in California. "I'm not sure we really want to take it."

And with good reason. For here is the essay question: can a generation—reared in affluence, schooled in self-importance, comparatively ignorant of national sacrifice—admit that the country can't support it as grandly in its old age as it did in its youth? Author Christopher Buckley, conservative son of the legendary Bill Buckley, is focusing the dry wit he inherited from his dad on a satirical novel called "Boomsday." In it, a twentysomething "Ayn Rand type" reacts to looming federal bankruptcy by mounting a political campaign to demand that all boomers do the patriotic thing: commit suicide at 70. Neither Clinton nor his generational successor, George W. Bush (who also turns 60 this year), has urgently confronted the pending explosion of national spending on health care and retirement, says Buckley. "Bush says he is a conservative, but I'm wondering if his policies aren't in reality an organic product of his being a boomer. His philosophy seems to be: enjoy it now!"

And that, of course, is the generational caricature: 75 million people who never met a need they didn't want to gratify—immediately. Boomers know the image that history tentatively has sketched of them. Their parents are memorialized as the "Greatest Generation": survivors of the Depression, victors in World War II, they built an American zenith, and begat the best-educated, best-fed—and now the most powerful—generation that any country has ever produced. But, in public life as in all else, the boomers have seemed confounded by their comfort—and come up far short of meeting Great Expectations.

They were the first, and so far only, generation to see itself en masse from infancy onward. Network TV and the boomer generational awareness rose in tandem, from the Peanut Gallery and "The Mickey Mouse Club" to "American Bandstand," campus protests and Woodstock. At the dawn of the boomer era, "The Howdy Doody Show" nominated its eponymous star for president. Producers printed 10,000 buttons as a joke; they were inundated with requests for hundreds of thousands of them. Young viewers by the tens of millions absorbed the noble myths purveyed by Walt Disney, whose announcer informed a nation of Mouseketeers that they were nothing less than "leaders of the 21st century" (whenever that was). "Davy Crockett was our Homer," says Tony Dolan, a conservative speechwriter (he now works for Donald Rumsfeld) and 1970 graduate of Yale College. "People don't appreciate how powerful those shows were."

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